As I think about my own family’s significant wealth and succession planning, I think there are some lessons, positive and negative, to glean from the Green family’s decision. I recently read his latest book about the experience, called Giving It All Away. Green thinks seriously about his wealth and about the Kingdom, but unfortunately his theology leaves him ill-prepared for the burden of wealth.

In the book, we see a glimpse into Green’s psychology, as his parents were dirt poor Pentecostals, his father a preacher and his mother a preacher’s wife. Pentecostalism is perhaps the purest expression of the low church Protestant impulse towards evangelism at all costs. Green’s mother in particular drove this into him and his siblings, such that David was the “black sheep” of the family while all of his brothers became ministers. As Hobby Lobby expanded and Green’s success developed, his mother withheld approval of her son, constantly asking, “Yes, but what have you done for the Lord lately?” His mother believed that all unnecessary activities outside of evangelism were wasteful.

This pietist impulse is in my view one of the most insidious forms of legalism in the church, and as a Christian with a legacy to give to my children, it is so dangerous that I have been working for several years on a book to counter the propaganda. For there is an entire Christian and non-Christian philanthropy industrial complex that seeks to separate the wealthy from their money. It says something about our age that even the secular wealthy cannot handle the burden, with prominent billionaires pledging to give it all away.

While Green calls himself a steward, in essence the plot of the book is his wanting to move away from the shoulder of responsibility and pass that on to a self-perpetuating board, initially consisting of his family members, that will give away the profits of Hobby Lobby in perpetuity to Christian ministries. I see several problems with this approach:

First, children have a right to an inheritance, a legal claim on the family fortune if they remain loyal and faithful to the family and faith. This is a Biblical concept. In my view, no family steward has the right to squander the family fortune, whether through profligate spending or profligate charity. One redeeming facet of Green’s action is that he got the permission of all his children and grandchildren to place their inheritance in the trust.

Second, there is no escaping the need for leadership and possession. We cannot “give” anything to God, for God has appointed us as His agents. Thus, the eventual result of Green’s actions will be the capture of his fortune by political players on his trust board, who have no skin in the game. There is a whole industry of Christian deceivers out there, like Randy Alcorn, who convince wealthy Christians to part with their fortunes “for the Kingdom.” If you read Alcorn’s books about the necessity of living like a pauper to maximize evangelism, and become convinced of his case, he conveniently already has a 501(c)(3) setup in which you can deposit your guilt-inducing cash. Of course, if it were theoretically possible to give one’s fortune to Christ directly, we would. But God delegates this task to us, the control and use of wealth. Green’s actions are simply him passing stewardship from one fallible human (himself), who at least has business sense and skin in the game, to other fallible humans purporting to represent Christ more directly due to their involvement in massive Christian charity bureaucracies. The Green family trust can do nothing with its money other than donate to these bureaucracies, and eventually these bureaucrats will control the trust as well.

Third, I believe Green’s plan will fail. Eventually, someone outside of the Green family will come onto the board of the trust, and through political influence will dilute the mission of the organization. This has happened numerous times – see the Ford Foundation, etc. Whenever there is a huge pile of money controlled by a board of people with no skin in the game, political players emerge to seek control for other ends. Liberals in particular are very skilled in using deception to worm their way into positions of influence. Green’s trust, by being explicitly Christian, is particularly vulnerable to judicial interference. If and when, for example, opposition to the homosexual agenda becomes “against public policy,” federal judges can and will dissolve the Green family trust or appoint alternative trustees to subvert the mission of the organization. Green’s trust documents are arguably already in violation of official public policy since he requires all trustees to have a “credible written testimony” of faith in Christ. By giving up possession of the Hobby Lobby fortune to an entity that is not the Green family, eventually it will be captured by the political process.

Wealthy people around the world cannot handle their wealth, and the desire to escape it, to annihilate it with philanthropy, is part, in my view, of the general death wish of modern civilization. No one has any true hope or vision for the future, whether the secular pessimism of a materialist like Bill Gates, or the premillenial, “waiting for the Rapture” variety held by many evangelicals like the Greens. The Gates Foundation is founded on the premise of humanism, that the highest use of a great fortune is to relieve human suffering before we all die a meaningless death. The Green family’s premise seems to be that of the fireman, who sees a building burning down and his sole mission is to rescue those inside. Neither can conceive of an optimistic future, of the necessity of building capital for the long haul for a glorious future in partnership with God.

My prescription for wealthy Christians? Grow your fortune as large as you lawfully can, retain control of it, discipline your children in its proper use. Give away 15% or so of the income as a long-term average, but never let a John Piper, Randy Alcorn or any other pietist who never created a job in his life anywhere near the principal. Don’t feel guilty for living well, for the tithe and a bit more is all God requires of you. The management of wealth is a multi-generational skill and God requires specialists – stewardship means bearing the burden required, not shrugging it off to be squandered by ministers, missionaries, “fundraising professionals” and other bureaucrats ill-equipped in its growth and management.

The following is the introduction to a book I am writing for my children, which I will post here as I have time to finish.

For the past couple of years, when I could fit it in, I have been writing a book for the benefit of my children on the topic of wealth and Christianity. That book, perhaps half finished, sets out to demolish politically correct ideas about wealth and Christian attitudes towards it.

It then occurred to me that such a book would hopefully not be necessary for a long time, if God-willing, I have a normal lifespan. What my children needed, more urgently, with my oldest being 14 as I write this in early 2016, is a book on life in general as they begin their journey as young adults. This book I hope to finish more quickly, by the end of 2017. We shall see if I reach my goal.

When I talk to my children about the world today, they often find it upsetting. They are being raised as orthodox Christians in a world increasingly hostile to that view. Ideas of morality and decency that were shared by nearly everyone a century ago are now relics of the past, at least in the media’s “mainstream” culture. So this book has two tasks: to explain to my children how our once great civilization arrived to the present moment, and to coach them on how to navigate, and thrive, in this new world. Societies built on pretty lies, like our society today, are inherently unstable. They may survive in their present course for a few more centuries, or they may degenerate so fast that they collapse of their own weight more quickly. Truth, however, never changes. As a parent, it is my special responsibility to inculcate truth in my children, even when surrounded by lies.

The audience of this book is a reasonably intelligent 16 to 18-year-old young man or woman, who generally shares my overall Christian worldview. As such, I will not be doing extensive apologetics of the basics of the Christian faith itself, but rather working to strip away politically correct barnacles that have attached themselves to that faith. Adult readers could certainly benefit from this work as well, but will hopefully excuse my deliberate efforts at explaining everything thoroughly, not assuming a whole lot of prior knowledge for my teenage audience. Plus, as I’ve matured as a writer, I’ve come to realize that complicated language is often used to hide foggy, imprecise thinking. Simpler language is a discipline for a writer, forcing ideas to be made clear and accessible and avoiding the need for interpretation.

The title of this book is Red Pill Christian. Unless you grew up in the 90’s, the term “red pill” may not be familiar. In 1999, an iconic movie was released, The Matrix, which provided the origin for this term. In this movie, set in the ostensible present-day at the time of its release, a young computer programmer named Neo begins to notice certain slight inconsistencies in the world he inhabits. These were little glitches in reality, things some might interpret as deja vu, but Neo notices it more deeply, largely due to glitches he observes on his computer. Soon after he begins to doubt the reality around him, he is contacted by a mysterious group of people who are being hunted vigorously by the police. Brought to a safe house under their protection, Neo and the leader of the rebel group, Morpheus, sit down to have a discussion.

Morpheus explains that Neo’s intuitions about the world are correct, but the truth is deeper and darker than he possibly imagined. Warning Neo that from learning this truth there can be no turning back, he offers Neo a choice of two pills, one red and one blue. If Neo swallows the blue pill, he will forget all of his experiences relating to doubting the consistency of the world around him and go back to his life as normal. If he swallows the red pill, he will be shown the full truth behind the broken reality he observes. Neo chooses the red pill, and immediately wakes up in a vat of warm water, in a gigantic tower of other similar vats filled with living human bodies, ripping away breathing tubes and other things attached to his naked form as he is rescued by Morpheus and his companions in a nearby hovering aircraft. The reality behind reality is that the movie is actually set far into the future, in a world where super-intelligent computers and robots had become self-aware, fought a war, and won, against their human creators. After their victory, most of the humans, except a few escaping rebels like Morpheus and his crew, are placed in huge installations where they live their lives in vats of water, deaf, blind and dumb, to serve as batteries for the machines who enslaved them. Human babies are created in artificial wombs to supply the banks of batteries, and from birth their minds are connected to a virtual reality program called “The Matrix,” which simulates what was considered the peak of human civilization in 1999. The glitches Neo observed were errors in this computer simulation. The vast majority of humanity has a life consisting of a dream inside of a computer, unaware of the horrific subjugation wrought by their machine slaves turned masters.

The first Matrix movie was by far the best, as so much of the plot was left open to interpretation. As often happens, sequels are constrained by having to explain all of the questions raised by the first movie, and when those answers are less satisfying than the questions themselves, the story falls apart. The first movie, however, remained a cultural icon of the times. The 90’s were a time of great paper wealth, with a huge stock market bubble, but little real progress in actual wealth. The Bubble popped in 2000, so the Matrix tapped into a real cultural item at the time, the feeling that things weren’t quite right despite the appearance of great prosperity.

Since that time, the term “red pill” has been co-opted by conservative realists to describe the feeling they often experienced when they discovered that our society was based on so many liberal lies. “Red Pill” types are diverse in their focus, ranging from a rejection of secularism, humanism, human equality, multiculturalism and/or feminism. I believe all of these groups are touching several parts of the same elephant, and that elephant has deep roots in Western culture.

In short, the “red pill” movement represents the rejection of the social doctrines of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement following the Reformation in 18th century Europe. Some of its doctrines were useful, such as the partial rejection of Aristotelian philosophy in science. Aristotle, and most of the historical philosophers, believed in reasoning things out from first principles. You would start from what was known and then make logical conclusions to discover what was unknown. Aristotle in particular stood as an intellectual giant in the Western world at this time, and so his method of reasoning, called deductive, was considered the gold standard of thinking. During the Enlightenment, a group emerged called the empiricists, who took an inductive approach to science. Their reasoning was based on trial and error, what we now call the scientific method. In a way, empiricism represented a new humbleness of man towards creation, in that man stopped trying to reason his way from first principles to understand something infinitely more complex than what the human mind could comprehend. By relying on observation rather than conjecture, by letting go of the need to have a comprehensive understanding of everything, man increased vastly his knowledge of the particular. The scientific method made man the master of nature, thanks to the advances in physics, chemistry, biology and other scientific fields. The advances in material quality of life due to the scientific method are inestimable and are the good fruit of the Enlightenment.

However, as is common when fallen man has success in any field, hubris followed scientific innovation. European man made an error in thinking that his mastery of nature would also enable him to master himself. Parallel to the empirical revolution in the sciences came a new philosophy of human nature. In contrast to Biblical doctrine and the collective wisdom of most of humanity from simple observation, Enlightenment thinkers believed many strange things about man. They believed that man was naturally good, and was only corrupted by society. Man was also seen as a tabula rasa, a “blank slate,” who had no defined nature for good or bad, but was only made that way by his environment. As such, all men were, fundamentally, equally capable of good, and equal in every other capacity as well, if only man could be liberated from the oppressive environment of society, particularly Christian society. All inequality between men, then, was a result of injustice which might be corrected with the same “scientific” approach to man’s environment that had worked so well in describing the mechanics of the universe.

The origins of Enlightenment thought on human nature go further back into history. Even as scientific thinkers of the Enlightenment corrected Greek errors in the approach to understanding the natural world, social thinkers of the Enlightenment resurrected certain Greek ideas, or at least amplified them. Medieval society was deeply Christian, with its belief in “The Great Chain of Being.” In this way of thinking, every creature, from God, to the kings, to the nobility, and down through the peasantry and even animals, were placed providentially in their positions by a loving God. Man’s role was not to rage against his position in life, but rather to submit to it and make the most of it, obeying God in his station and submitting to the spiritual discipline of contentment.

Enlightenment thought on human nature and society, however, came from a historically non-Christian source. Greek thought had always held that the essence of man was a spirit, and that the universe itself was an imperfect material representation of a perfect universe of forms. Thus, a circle made of wood was always imperfect in some way, but represented the ideal of a circle on the spiritual plane. Man’s spirit, it was thought, existed on this higher plane, and the ideal for man was to free himself from the restrictions of the material world. The highest human accomplishment was that of philosophy, the pondering of perfect forms and ideas independent of the physical realm.

There were undoubtedly some advantages to Greek thought, in developing the idea of the abstract, to see common threads between somewhat dissimilar things in life. Such an approach enabled the Greeks to make great strides in math and geometry, the disciplines most akin to highly abstract, idealizing thinking. The Greeks took their ideas, however, too far in talking about the nature of man. Their mistakes, of course, are forgivable given that the Greeks had no direct revelation from God. The amazing thing about Greek and Roman philosophy is not their errors, but how close they were able to reach the truth despite lacking, until the rise of Christianity, any direct communication from the Creator.

The Bible, as revealed truth, speaks of man’s nature more accurately. Man is spirit, but also flesh. He is divine in a sense of carrying the image of God, but fallen and a slave to sin. Only the Bible captures this dual nature of man, having some qualities of angels and some qualities of brute animals. The incarnation of Christ further confirmed the true nature of man. For in the incarnation, Christ took on flesh, flesh he retains in glorified form to this day. Christian theology revealed that man’s spirit will not be his eternal state but rather that man would have a glorified body like Christ. The Christian view is that the flesh and the body are not fundamentally inferior to the spirit. Man is equally both, and God increased His glory by taking on flesh, and eternally having part of the Godhead remain fully man and fully God. It was at the same time both a lower view of man than the Greeks, but also a higher view. God, it should be noted, never took the form of an angel on a permanent basis, but the form of his particular image-bearer, man. There is a divine mystery in how the infinite is magnified through the finite container of a flesh-and-blood body.

Greek errors about the nature of man persisted into the Christian era. The idea of Christ as both man and God offended man’s sensibilities, and so the primary heresies afflicting the church throughout history have been related to either the incarnation or the Trinity. Gnosticism probably remains the most lasting influence, a complex early Christian heresy that blended aspects of Greek philosophy with Christian theology. The chief distinction of the Gnostics was their retaining the belief that the material world was somehow lower than, or even a corruption of the spiritual world, and that the path to salvation was to acquire secret knowledge (“gnosis”) that would enable the divine soul in every human to transcend their material limitations.

There seems to be something in man that chafes against both the Incarnation and the Trinity. Our ideal of forms rejects that a God could be multiple persons, yet unified. Men do not want to admit that there may be realities beyond human comprehension that will manifest themselves as paradoxes. Since we can understand a strictly monistic (i.e. one person) God, we prefer that He be that way. The Incarnation, likewise, rubs man the wrong way because he wants to believe that he may be allowed to enter the world of the spiritual and infinite, which he believes is somehow more desirable than the dual existence God has ordained for his lot. Man, like Satan, seeks transcendence beyond his station. In this way, we can trace a common thread, that of rejecting real limitations, between Greek, Gnostic, Enlightenment and modern liberal or “blue pill” thought patterns.

Enlightenment social doctrine was at first used to undermine the authority of Christianity and the Christian monarchies of Europe, resulting in the replacement of the old, medieval and clerical elite with a new elite of intellectuals and merchants. When this did not bring about sufficient equality to match expectations, liberal thought moved from supporting equality in rank and political power to equality in outcome.

In the mid-19th-century, the radical political doctrines of Marxism, Communism and Anarchism emerged in Europe. The seminal work of Communism, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, taught that property ownership was oppressive and that the economic order of free enterprise and capitalism was inherently exploitive. Communism was explicitly atheist, dismissing the Christian religion as an “opiate of the masses” that provided exploited workers with a “false consciousness” pinning their hopes on a world to come rather than the world as it was.

A strictly materialistic worldview, Communism / Marxism promulgated a deterministic future history, where society would move irresistibly from pre-industrial feudalism to free market capitalism and finally to communism. All authority, from the king’s over his subject to the lowliest peasant father’s over his children, were seen as evidence of exploitation to be eliminated by revolution. Marxists were amoral except towards this one end, absolute material equality, and would use any means necessary to bring about their utopia. Marxism was the final stage of Enlightenment social thought, the ultimate faith in man’s perfectibility and equality if only provided the right environment.

The problem for this kind of thinking is that it contradicts reality. But like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, those who push these ideas, of man’s equality and goodness, are less interested in evidence but in suppressing evidence. When liberal ideas do not work, the refrain is that they have not really been tried hard enough. Liberals demand that reality bend to their wishes and will use any means they can to force it to conform.

In the late 19th century, a new secular idea emerged that challenged the beliefs of the Enlightenment: the birth of Darwinism. And before I can discuss Darwinism versus Enlightenment ideas, I must summarize Darwin and my opinion of his work.

Charles Darwin was a naturalist who noticed that particular, closely related species of finches in the Galapagos Islands seemed uncannily adapted to their environment. Since the islands as a whole were presumably populated by a common finch ancestor, but the islands differed significantly in their fauna, it fascinated Darwin that finches on different islands had adapted particular beaks for consuming their varied food sources. The finches had evolved, Darwin not unreasonably assumed, from a common ancestor to adapt to the challenges of their environment. The English had historically been the most advanced society in Europe in the science of animal husbandry and selective breeding. Darwin knew that human selection could result in animals as different as a 10 lb chihuahua and an Alaskan Huskie. With environmental pressure for change, he posited that such selection could occur naturally as well, just as a litter of puppies from common parents will have a variety of traits. Animals having features better able to help them survive were more likely to pass those traits on to offspring. From this Darwin proposed his theory of “common descent with modification,” with the idea that the engine of modification was “natural selection.” This theory became known by the term “evolution.”

Darwin pre-dated our modern understanding of genes, so Darwin did not know how traits passed themselves from parent to offspring, only that such passing could be observed. The findings of later scientists would fully flesh out Darwinism, with the addition to the theory of random mutations of genes followed by natural selection. This became known as neo-Darwinism and represents the mainstream of scientific thought in biology today.

Science, however, is distinguished by not being a enterprise where truth is based on everyone agreeing. Every major scientific revolution, every advance of human knowledge, involves the destruction of the old ideas by a new theory that is fiercely resisted by those who have come before. If the scientific method is the engine of our greater understanding of nature, it is ironically scientists themselves that represent the friction and resistance the engine must overcome each time it advances our knowledge. This is not necessarily bad, as most new ideas in science are wrong, and in any field a degree of conservatism and resistance to change is necessary to avoid being taken in by foolishness. The error is when we assume that scientists agreeing on something means it’s true, when the whole history of science is knowledge advancing by showing how today’s scientists are wrong. Scientists are also human, and numerous histories of science have documented how it usually takes an entirely new generation of scientists to correct the errors of those who came before. Most older scientists, who represent the majority opinion, cannot overcome their natural tendency to support their own theories over upstarts seeking to prove them wrong.

Darwin undoubtedly discovered something important in his finches. The capacity of life to adapt itself to new environments is undeniable but was poorly understood at the time. The basic idea of evolution, of adaptation based on natural selection, could be observed directly in nature. Where Darwin went wrong, I believe, was in extrapolating small changes observed in finches to his idea that all life was descended from a common ancestor. I do not blame Darwin, however, for this error. Christians today I believe are too hard on Darwin, who was an honest man. During Darwin’s times, it was plausible, from a scientific view, to assume that biology might be as simple as physics, which had been so elegantly (and almost completely) described by the mathematical work of Sir Isaac Newton. The biologists of Darwin’s time simply had no idea of the complexity of life, of how every cell in every organism is more complex than anything man had ever invented. If Newton had demonstrated that the non-living world was governed by simple, understandable laws that did not require conscious moment-by-moment intervention from a divine agent, then perhaps life might have a simple explanation as well.

Darwin also lacked, at his time, what I believe to be the most powerful mathematical science useful in the analysis of evolutionary ideas: that of information theory. As communications technology like radios and telephones took off around 1900, electrical engineers began exploring the concept of signal and noise. The traditional view of science is that science feeds theories down to engineers, who implement scientific findings into useful technologies. This is a simplistic view, though, as scientific information is also generated, and arguably more of it, when a theory is put to practical use in the real world.

If you’ve ever used a walky-talky, you know the sound it produces is a combination of information (the voice of the other person) and pops, squeaks and static, or noise. This noise finds its source, among other places, in the background radio signals of our planet, influenced by Earth’s magnetic fields, which are randomly intercepted by the antenna of the walky-talky and repeated through the speaker. The longer distance the communications, whether over radio or telephone wires, the more noise from the outside environment hurts the signal. As the engineers sought to improve long distance communications at minimum cost, they discovered certain properties about noise and signals.

One useful thing they discovered is that once a certain amount of noise finds its way into a signal, the information that remains is as useless to the recipient as the noise itself. Noise destroys information quickly and once scrambled, past a certain point it is impossible to put the information back together again. Another useful thing they discovered is that all language, all information and even all noise, really anything that can be observed, can be converted into what is called binary code, or a series of 1’s and 0’s. This is the basis of computers, which at their heart consist of a massive amount of 0’s and 1’s, which are recombined by the computer to make the music we listen to or the movies we watch. This binary language is simple, as it only has two letters, 0 and 1, so it takes a really long sequence to describe real world information. A single dot of color on your computer screen takes 32 bits, or 32 0’s and 1’s, to be described inside your computer. If that seems really wasteful, it is in a sense, but since computer memory is basically a huge number of switches, it can only remember that a certain bit is “on” or “off.” Computers are as powerful as they are because engineers have discovered how to very cheaply make billions and trillions of bits of computer memory, and have that take up a small space.

Since all signals and noise could be converted into essentially a simple sequence of numbers, this meant that any information, or noise, could be mathematically analyzed. The engineers and applied scientists at AT&T, the American Telegraph & Telephone Company, discovered that they could do a calculation and determine the likelihood that a sequence of 1’s and 0’s was actually information or just noise. In most cases, with enough of a sample, they could determine this to a very high degree of confidence. Just the sentence I am writing at this very moment would likely have a 99.9999+% probability of being actual information as opposed to random noise. Similarly, five seconds of radio static could be determined to be random, information-free noise to the same degree of confidence.

The relevance of information theory to evolution is that we have never observed, in a huge sample of observation, any natural process produce information. Information is always produced by minds and no one has demonstrated that the complexities of life, which largely require the creation of information, can emerge from a mindless process. As an example, consider the simple language of a humble bee, as it dances to communicate information about the location of flowers to its sisters. This language is fairly well understood by biologists, and can be written as a code that can then be digitized, or turned into zeroes and ones, and analyzed. The language of bees is relatively simple by human standards, but the mathematics of information theory would reveal that they are non-random and contain real information. If we similarly digitized radio static, as mentioned above, resulting from non-living mindless natural processes, we could again determine with mathematical certainty that this was truly noise and did not contain information. We have literally never observed information being generated by a non-living source.

As I mentioned before, I do think evolution is extremely useful as a concept, in its proper place, and does not conflict with Scripture. I distinguish between information-winnowing evolution and information-growing evolution. The terms are loaded in the evolution debate, but it’s convenient to say macroevolution for those changes that claim that non-living and mindless processes can create information, and microevolution for those processes that reduce information. The latter concept explains that a finch may reduce or modify its beak through natural selection, or that a wolf may be bred into a chihuahua. What evolution cannot do is turn a dog into a zebra or a bird into a rabbit, since to do so would require mindless processes to create new information. I would also argue, but not as strongly, that all processes of evolution that actually happen are information destroying, in that we may reduce a wolf to a chihuahua, be we cannot turn the chihuahua back into a wolf.

Macroevolution holds that life has an entirely material origin. It holds that something as complex as a cell, a miniature chemical factory, could emerge from non-living sources. This means it claims something that has never been observed, which is the creation of information from something mindless. Macroevolution further claims that the most complex object in the known universe, the human brain, is the result of mindless processes. I do realize that very intelligent scientists disagree with me on this, but my intuition tells me that is impossible. And without the ability to observe it, I cannot overcome my intuition.

This is not to say that true Christians cannot believe in macroevolution. Some Christian theistic evolutionists hold to a view that God guided evolution, as a means of Creation, either guiding it through small acts of improbable mutations or else somehow embedding the capacity for macroevolution into the laws of physics which we admittedly do not yet completely understand. This is, in my view, legitimate theologically, though a weaker interpretation in my view of Scripture. It is also not a materialistic view of life, since it presupposes that God would need to intervene to create the very unlikely mutations necessary to bring about new species. In this way, theistic evolution is a type of Creationism, because God is still necessary. However, having studied theistic evolution and its claims, and the counterclaims of the Intelligent Design and information theory apologists, I conclude that the latter is more likely to have it right.

Specifically, if we look at the archeological record, the Cambrian Explosion created so many new groups of animals that the mathematics of those appearing in a relatively short period due to random mutations and natural selection is pretty much nil. The Cambrian Explosion was an event in the fossil record that occurred over 25 million years, which is pretty small, comprising less than 1% of the total time that life has existed on the Earth, according to scientific estimates. Now many Christians who I respect would disagree with the presupposition that the Earth could be billions of years old, but the important point here is that even if the Earth is that old, it still would not be nearly enough time to produce the complexities of life by random chance. The Cambrian Explosion narrows the range further, as it has a huge number of different, brand new types of organisms emerging in this relatively tiny period of time. This has been a problem in the fossil record for evolution, and was noted by Darwin, who assumed that future geological discoveries would find evidence showing that the Explosion was actually not an explosion, but had gone on for a much longer time. Unfortunately for evolutionists, the geological record discovered since Darwin’s time has not changed appreciably the significance of the Cambrian event. New theories have been proposed to deal with the difficulty, but scientists continue to disagree on how the event happened, indicating no one has yet come up with a good enough explanation.

Honest macroevolutionists acknowledge these problems, but mostly privately, not wanting to give political talking points to Creationists. As a result, high school and introductory college biology books still present an antiquated view of evolutionary theory, without an honest presentation of the conceptual gaps of how it actually happened, admitted by biologists themselves. These evolutionists are diligently working to modify and correct Darwinian theory to account for some of the logistical problems encountered by classical Darwinism. They have faith that a material explanation will be found, but their “Darwin of the gaps” mental model is more faith-based than the Christian who accepts that Creation had to involve supernatural acts by a supernatural mind based on evidence in nature.

The idea that life could happen without God may be taken at face value by some people because of common human errors when thinking about big numbers. For example, if I asked about the odds of a fair coin coming up heads 10,000 times in a row, many people would just assume that the odds would be something like 10,000 to 1. The actual odds are so tiny as to be practically zero. To illustrate, if we flipped a coin once per second for 5 billion years, we would still have a practically zero chance of coming across 10,000 heads in a row. The actual number is a decimal with approximately 3,000 zeroes followed by a 5. The number is so small we don’t even have a name for it. It just wouldn’t happen. Yet many of the things that had to happen for life to happen accidentally are much more improbable than 10,000 sequential coin tosses.

Two explanations offered by respected scientists for the improbable origin of life demonstrate how big of a problem this is for the materialist view. One is that of panspermia – serious scientists propose that space aliens must have “seeded” the Earth with life, the probability of it happening is so low naturally. Of course, this is no solution at all, as then we have to ask about the origins of the aliens. The second one, more common, is this idea of the multiverse. Physicists have proposed that all possible universes exist, so that every time anything happens, like the flip of a coin, the universe splits in two, where one comes up heads and one comes up tails. The idea is that if we have infinite universes, there would eventually be one that created life, and eventually intelligent life, at random. And since God can’t be real, we must just happen to live in the one where all of this happened. Note that both of these theories are not really science, because they cannot be tested. We cannot observe whether aliens seeded the Earth, and the existence of another universe is by definition unknowable. That these ideas are respected among scientists shows how tenuous the position of a material origin for life really is.

I have taken an extended rabbit trail on this issue, getting into some apologetics, because I want to make myself clear when we get into the impact of Darwinism on Western thought, especially in comparison to the Enlightenment, and Christian overreactions to Darwinism. I do not believe in macroevolution, and I do not think you should either. I’ll say one more thing apologetics-wise before returning to my primary argument.

This book you’re reading represents information. As I write, information in my mind is being typed by my fingers into the computer, where it is stored in computer memory. We know this book is real, but what is the information contained in this book? Is it the paper or computer screen you are reading? Is it in my mind? We all know that a copy of a book is not the book itself, just like a recording of a song is not the song itself. In other words, information represents something we work with every day that is essentially non-material. It is always stored materially, but it is not itself material. It exists independent of yet dependent on the material world for its existence. The existence of information shows that we cannot live in a world that consists only of atoms, unless we admit that information is itself an illusion. Yet since the idea that information is an illusion is also information, we self-contradict. If all knowledge is information and all information is an illusion, then the very statement we just made is itself an illusion, and unprovable. Denying the non-material nature of information denies the highest reality we know, as everything we experience consists of information present in the mind. If we believe the universe is completely material, we cannot reason to that position unless we “borrow” the concept of a non-material universe, the validity of logic and reasoning, from Christianity or another faith.

Let us remember that the Enlightenment produced some good results in science, and some bad results in social theory. Out of whole cloth, Enlightenment theorists claimed that men were equal, and naturally good, that any differences between people were the result of environment, an environment that could be controlled and improved. Inequality was evidence of exploitation and so the government should work to prevent inequality and human conflict would be vastly decreased.

Darwinism, while over extending itself, in my view, to account for the entire origin of life, corrected much of the social thinking of the Enlightenment. The Biblical view of man is that he is fallen, with a dual nature capable of recognizing some good but ultimately in need of divine intervention. The Enlightenment said man was an angel, only corrupted by society, the Church, guilt, inequality and lack of education. Darwinism said man was an animal, nothing more and nothing less. The true, Christian view is frankly closer to the Darwinian view than the Enlightenment view. As an approximate illustration:

Two things propelled Darwinism’s advance in the late 1800’s. First, it was demonstrably more true than Enlightenment views. Man was selfish and much of the world looked like a brute struggle for survival. Second, it was attractive to conservatives. For years, conservatives, who at this time were loyal to King and Church, throne and altar, were mocked by Enlightenment types for their beliefs in religious superstition. The Enlightenment was mostly successful in its push for secularism, for a number of reasons. The great advances in science had eliminated many superstitions, that is, false supernatural beliefs. An error many fell into was to assume that because many superstitious supernatural beliefs were demonstrably false, it therefore followed that all supernatural beliefs, including the core doctrines of the Christian faith, might be false as well. Conservatives began to have their doubts as well, especially at the top of society where scientific advances were held in high esteem. The memory of the great religious wars of Europe also played a role, as the generation following, beginning around 1700, looked back in sickness at the death and destruction that occurred over religious arguments. Conservatives embraced secularism, among the elite, even if they remained skeptical of the radical equality claims of the rest of the Enlightenment.

In Darwinism, conservatives found a scientific validation for many of their instincts against the Enlightenment that did not require them to be embarrassed about or believe in Biblical revelation. Against calls for equality, the conservative could rely on the Darwinian view that inequality is a part of nature, whether between the sexes or among groups of men. Natural selection, popularized as “Survival of the Fittest,” provided a scientific validation for the “Great Chain of Being,” and that stifling competition and imposing artificial equality would only encourage those less fit to reproduce. A new conservative doctrine of “Social Darwinism” arose to justify both the inequality and advances associated with capitalism and the final phases of the Industrial Revolution. Only by tolerating inequality, and allowing outsized rewards to innovators, could talented men be motivated to serve the larger population with technological advances like petroleum, railroads and the telephone.

This era was known as “The Gilded Age” and there is a stereotype of greedy Social Darwinists hoarding great fortunes while the masses lived in poverty. This is an unfair picture of the period, because even with the greatest monopolies known to man, the tycoons of this age were only able to capture a tiny amount of the value they produced. Yes, the Rockefellers were rich, but the value they produced for society, through cheap energy and its distribution, vastly exceeded what they kept for themselves. The stereotypes of the “robber barons,” as they were later called, are unfair as well. Far from being amoral, greedy, pure Darwinists, Rockefeller and others gave a large portion of their earned fortunes away. Many of them, like Rockefeller, were deeply religious and frugal men who explicitly saw their business activities as a calling from God.

So all in all, the immediate social effects of Darwinism were good, in the sense that it temporarily gave conservatives confidence against the demands of Enlightenment thinkers, especially the more dangerous beliefs of Marxism and Communism. Most men of this period retained some degree of Christian belief, even if much of their orthodoxy was eroded by doubts driven by the cumulative effects of secularism, scientific advance and Darwinism.

The problem, however, was that this seed of doubt in the supernatural, and the belief that man was nothing more than a brute animal, continued to grow. Men may continue for a while in an old belief, or at least the outward forms of that belief, like church attendance, but eventually ideas lead to actions. In the late 19th century, the German philosopher Nietzsche took macroevolutionary ideas to their logical consequence: if natural causes could explain the origin of life, no God was necessary. He famously said, “God is dead,” not so much as a declaration of belief, though he was an atheist, but a declaration of fact that, among the elite in Europe at the time, belief in God, especially the personal God as revealed in the Bible, was nearly gone. Nietzsche advanced and predicted a coming worldview that saw man as merely a “mechanical animal,” locked in a brutal struggle for existence against other groups of men and nature itself. Christianity and other belief systems that called for charity to the poor, or measured aggression only under threat, he derided as “slave moralities” that degraded the more noble and natural motives of man, which he saw as the “will to power.” He believed man had a natural drive to dominate and slave moralities like Christianity were simply propaganda used by the weak to prevent the strong from reaching their full potential.

Nietzsche’s philosophy was called “nihilism,” that is, a belief in nothing. To Nietzsche, man was a meaningless animal, an accidental collection of atoms. To the extent man could have meaning, he would have to invent it himself, to use his force of will to choose and impose his own morality upon the world. Of course, this morality would be ultimately meaningless, but Nietzsche believed man’s highest act was to stoically impose some sort of order on the meaningless world through pure force of will. It was all man could do, to accept the ugliness of his meaningless existence, and impose his will, while he could, while he existed.

If nihilism sounds like a depressing way of thinking, I’d agree with you. Nietzsche himself died in a mental institution. Yet, in a way, Nietzsche brought materialism to its rational conclusion. If man was nothing more than an animal, then morality is an illusion. The philosophy of Darwinism, which had energized conservatives at first, would eventually demoralize them. Nietzsche had predicted the carnage of the First World War, and the leaders of that war were partially influenced by this philosophy that man was merely an animal. Technological change had made it easier than ever for men to kill each other just at the moment that all moral codes were abdicated. After the war, many people in the West were demoralized, and cited the great horror of the war as a reason that God could not exist.

So while microevolution is undoubtedly true and useful, macroevolution, in saying that God did not create life and may not exist, demoralized those who believed in it. If we think about it, man either has a spiritual component or he does not. If man does have a spiritual component, yet believes and adopts a philosophy contrary to that truth, then he will find it demoralizing, for his own experience will contradict his belief. Conservatives after World War I were a uniformly pessimistic and nihilistic group. They advocated tradition for hollow utilitarian ends without really believing in it. Even today, the most consistent macroevolutionists are conservatives, who now acknowledge that religion, far from being harmful, is helpful as a survival mechanism. They have painted themselves into a corner, where they know we need religious faith to restore our civilization, yet the fundamental beliefs leading them to that conclusion preclude any sort of supernatural faith.

Macroevolution and materialism can then be seen as a false philosophical extension of Darwin’s legitimate scientific observations. Darwin’s theory explained much about life and was a more accurate description of man’s nature than the Enlightenment, but it went too far in characterizing man as purely animal. This view would not be stomached long, and so the net effect of the brief ascent of philosophical Darwinism was a reaction against it. This happened after the horror of both World War I and II. Man simply could not live with nihilism. As Nietzsche had famously said, “when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”

There were two academic movements that came about to push back on the Darwinian view of man and re-advance and strengthen the Enlightenment view right around 1900. The first was that of Boasian anthropology, led by Jewish scientist Franz Boas of Columbia University. Until Boas, anthropologists, who study man, had focused on applying Darwin’s theories to the observed differences between groups of people. All of their observations, it should be noted, were based on the legitimate microevolutionary part of Darwin’s theories. Boas, however, was a dedicated liberal and took to falsifying data showing that immigrants to America somehow developed larger skulls after immigrating to the country. The implication, of course, is that intelligence and brain size has nothing to do with genetics but to do with environment. Immigrants grew larger brains, Boas reported, when they came to the better environment of the United States.

Boas and his disciples were absolutely committed to an ideal of human equality and essentially drove the naturalists and conservatives out of the profession. Any explanation that contradicted their insistence on absolute human equality was rejected out-of-hand. Instead, Boas insisted that cultural differences and environment explained all differences among people, with genetics playing only a superficial role. Because Boas only believed evidence that supported his theories, and ruthlessly suppressed all opposition, he was functionally a pseudoscientist.

Boas, then, resurrected Enlightenment thinking in regards to man’s physical nature. Sigmund Freud, in his own way, resurrected it in view of man’s spiritual nature. Freud was a Jewish-Austrian psychologist who, like Boas, came up with his own pseudoscience called psychoanalysis. I’m going to have to be rather uncouth to describe Freud, but his work is important to know in its particulars.

Freud was basically obsessed with sex and assumed everyone else was too. He posited that pre-pubescent children were sexual creatures secretly attracted to their parents, and that most human problems were the result of sexual repression. Men, he claimed, really wanted to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. Christian sexual morals, in particular, he derided as causing unnecessary guilt and a host of psychological problems in the Christian population. Freud essentially restated the Enlightenment theories of man as perfectible, but with the added twist that sexual morality and Christianity specifically were to blame for people’s problems, whether lack of self-control, violence or psychological delusions. The implication of Freud’s view, something the original Enlightenment theorists would have been afraid to publicly advance, is that man could be perfected if only the repressive guilt of Christianity were removed from society and children raised without any sexual restraint.

While all of this was going on, Christians, especially American Christians, began accepting certain Enlightenment doctrines. They embraced a modified theory of man’s perfectibility, that man’s problems could be eliminated by the spread of the gospel. Now, this is true to a certain degree, as the Holy Spirit sanctifies people. But the reaction against Darwinism among Christians also included embracing Enlightenment doctrines of equality. In this way, most Christians joined what I call the new humanitarian consensus on human nature.

The secular world had become tired of the materialist view of man as too depressing, even if it was more accurate than the perfectible view of man. So the view that came about was to accept Darwinism as applying to animals, but to exclude it when applied to humans. Humans were declared, contrary to evidence, to be perfectly equal in ability except for cosmetic differences. This rehabilitation of the Enlightenment view actually strengthened it. Darwinism had finished off, among the elite, any real belief in the God of the Bible. Now that they rejected the Darwinist view of man as an incorrigible animal but kept Darwinist atheism, they could embrace Enlightenment views of man without the hassle of its contradicting the Bible. Following in this wake was Freud, with his prescription that Christianity in particular was to blame for people’s psychological problems, due to sexual repression. The secular world had everything it could want: freedom from Biblical moral codes, especially surrounding sex, and a new faith that scientists could find ways to improve man’s environment and perfect him.

Christians of course rejected the atheistic and amoral parts of this new consensus, but they accepted the basic equality of man. After World War II especially, it became very unfashionable, due to the actions of Nazi Germany, to believe in any kind of human differences. Jews, persecuted by the Nazis, had enormous influence outside of Nazi Germany and used this influence to ensure that such a thing would happen “never again.”

The Jewish diagnosis of what happened in Nazi Germany was led by a set of theorists known as the Cultural Marxists, and typical of Jewish social science movements, its adherents were highly pseudoscientific, relying on the charisma and authority of movement leaders, and just-so explanations of contrary evidence, sometimes including, like Boas, outright falsification of data, to achieve a predetermined conclusion. This group has the most direct influence on the anti-Christian culture we see today. Combining elements of Marx, Boas, and Freud, and mostly based at the University of Frankfurt in Weimar Germany, they explained the failure of Marxism as not anything fundamentally lacking in Marxism itself, but rather the Christianity’s power to instill a “false consciousness” in the working class. A major intellectual force in Germany that supported the degeneracy of the Weimar era, including open child pornography and prostitution, the “Frankfurt School” were forced to flee to America when Hitler came to power, finding a new home at Columbia University in New York City.

The Cultural Marxists decried in pseudoscientific studies like The Authoritarian Personality that Christian religious belief, traditional sexual mores and the nuclear family, particularly respect for fathers, were incubators of fascism. That the Christian American family, and particularly American men, had been the best friend of the Jewish people, defeating Nazism, supporting the founding of and defense of Israel, and providing the scholars of the Frankfurt School themselves with asylum, was of no importance. Americans were, in their view, the same banally evil, dangerous potential Nazis as the Germans, and only the destruction of the nuclear family could prevent Jewish persecution in the future. Their chutzpah and ingratitude knew no bounds.

To the Cultural Marxists, irrational religious beliefs, attendant sexual repression, and respect for authority prevented the economically exploited from rising up and violently overthrowing their exploiters as Marxist theory demanded. Thus, they concluded, an intermediate phase of Marxism was necessary that would focus on the culture in order to destroy Christianity and the Christian family. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cultural Marxism is the most common form of Marxism encountered in the world today. It is the source of the “blue pill” way of thinking.

The secular world you live in today of course rejects Christian principles, but also any kind of standard. Men can marry men, or pretend to be women and the only thing that anyone judges is anyone who lacks tolerance. However, an unfortunate effect of Cultural Marxism is how it has influenced many of the churches and many Christians themselves.

The Church has broadly narrowed its focus to the mechanics of salvation only, and largely neglected its broader mission to be salt and light in the world. Like their secular counterparts, pastors live in fear of the hostile media, and because of the inherently political nature of their jobs, cannot rock the boat very much. One defamatory newspaper story could put most pastors out of a job, so timid and cowardly are most of the Christians who attend their congregations.

Thus, the responsible Christian who wants to know the broader truth, and influence the culture in a comprehensive Kingdom way, must seek out this knowledge for themselves. These writings, of which this is the first, is my attempt to do so for you.

First, there is nothing like winning – victory is sweet indeed. Part of the problem of cucked Christianity is it deprives men of their natural drive to fight, and of the indescribable thrill of “battle joy” when we win over our enemies. It almost brings me to tears of joy to think of the great men who have kept the “pilot light” of nationalism alive in the last two decades – Sam Francis, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Richard Spencer, Louis Andrews, and many others. They held the line when it was not popular to do so, and they are now vindicated.

Below I propose four major policy actions that should be taken immediately by a Trump administration.

Use the Printing Press & the Imperial Presidency to Consolidate Gains – This is no time to cuck out and go back to being the Washington Generals. There is no next time for a Republican administration, and it is time to clean house, using the full power of the Presidency to crush our enemies and reward our friends. If people associated with the SPLC and Clinton Foundation are not in prison within 18 months, we’ve blown the opportunity. We know the crimes are there. It’s time to find them. Alt Right / Trump-Friendly businesses ought to be first in line for federal contracts. Make the revolution permanent. If we decimate the Establishment power structure, fully exposing the extent of their crimes to the American people, and we provide a funding and institutional base for our own replacement for the Establishment, we can probably buy 2-3% of the vote, postponing the demographic rot another cycle.

National Voter Security – The Trump coalition is very fragile. Despite what the Electoral College shows, we won this thing by the skin of our teeth. It appears Hillary will win the popular vote. We can thank the Founding Fathers for the Electoral College, an anti-democratic system that gives disproportionate influence to rural whites in less populous states, and firewalls the rot in places like California. Nevertheless, we will lose if current demographic trends continue, and so our first action must be to take 3-4% of the vote off the table for the Democrats by implementing robust voter security procedures. In short, President Trump must appoint a commission to study vote security, with an outcome of recommendations for national standards for secure, verified voting. These standards should be passed by Congress and tied to federal funds and other sticks and carrots (maybe states that elect to not adopt the standards should lose sovereign immunity). States either adopt or go bankrupt, no choice. Trump might consider nationalizing the administration of elections as well (perhaps with an “E-Verify” type system), if he has the political capital – this is riskier if a Democratic administration gets power, but it’s already obvious that if another Democrat gets elected, Republicans are completely screwed anyway. They will simply amnesty enough people by fiat to make sure Republicans never win again.

Immigration Reform – Beyond the obvious step of implementing the Trump agenda as stated in the campaign, Trump must also work to increase immigration from Republican friendly groups. While the Overton window is not quite ready for a race-based immigration policy, I believe Trump’s idea of an ideological-driven immigration test may be more powerful. Because honestly, if we import a bunch of liberals who vote Democratic, even if they’re white they’ll do more long-term damage. The Trump administration can use the “vetting” process to select for and prefer white immigrants likely to support the Republican coalition. Afrikaners, for example, should immediately be given refugee status and settled in rural areas, where they will assimilate to local values. Eastern Europeans should be given priority as well – they are conservative and we know Donald likes them already. Crazy fantasy idea: Long-term, Russia and the US merge into a superstate, “one country, two systems” like China and Hong Kong, with Russians given electoral votes.

National Immigration Commission – As good as victory feels, the Alt Right knows that we can’t win permanently by simply running out the clock. It will be necessary to strip some people of citizenship, or else severely restrict voting, to save the country. To broaden the Overton window, a national commission, staffed appropriately, must study and document the massive fraud undertaken by Democrats over the last 40 years to illegally qualify people for citizenship. Then we must reverse the fraud, in some way we can sell to the public. It’s hard to know what our coalition will allow, how social mood will continue to develop. My best idea here would be to form some sort of modified quasi-citizenship for these people, and restrict their votes to certain semi-independent city states. Perhaps Miami and Los Angeles become semi-sovereign commonwealths like Puerto Rico. This is the hard part, and the Alt Right ought to be thinking hard about this.

This is the big question: how do we undo the mess? What specific policy proposals can we sell to the public to actually reverse our demographic decline?

Trump buys us time, but the situation remains dire under what appear to be the current constraints of policy. We must not rest, but diligently continue to push the Overton window to the right, and not let Trump get distracted from delivering what he promised and a whole lot more.

Christians believe that man is made in the image of God, which is to say that man is more valuable than animals. The vast differences between the lowest men and highest animals – our brains are three times the size of the great apes – is biological fact. Because man can plan for the future, communicate in abstractions via language, and has a sense of the infinite, the utilitarian ethics of dealing with animals, in the Christian view, are not appropriate for man. A cattle rancher is perfectly within his rights and decency to raise cattle for slaughter and cull the defective from the herd. Our understanding of genetics comes in no small part due to our experience with animal husbandry, and our responsibility towards animals, at least the higher ones, is to not cause undue suffering in their deaths, for they can apprehend immediate danger and terror.

Some in the Alt Right seek to apply the ethics of animal breeding to humans. They like abortion because it reduces the population numbers of non-whites. They support selective abortion of special needs children with genetic defects. They in some cases support euthanasia for the weak and sick. Even by the Alt Right’s own standards, these ethics will not accomplish the goals they seek. A corollary of Christian morality is that God never requires us to act against our true, long-term self-interest. Support of abortion and other utilitarian approaches to human life are morally wrong, and also against our self-interest as a people.

First, to the numbers argument. If race is but an extended family, then this argument is akin to saying, “I love my children more than the children of my neighbor. Therefore, if I can kill four of my neighbor’s children and one of mine, I’ve increased the love I have for my remaining children, and my position relative to my neighbor’s.” This is ludicrous reasoning, because good is not maximized on a relative basis, but an absolute basis. We are not responsible for governing the behavior of other peoples – if African countries have abortion, for example, we would not be justified to fight a war to make them end it. We are only responsible for our own government and behavior, and our own societies. Killing even one of our own makes us morally responsible for that death, regardless of what other groups choose in relation to their own children. The numbers argument doesn’t even make political sense, as the demographic “fix” for America is in. The problem is not with the pro-life position, but with our immigration, welfare and democratic policies of our polyglot empire. Regardless of how abortion affects relative numbers of blacks and whites, ultimately we can only restore white hegemony through non-democratic means, if democratic means one human one vote. Our problem is not a numbers game, but rather an act of will that must take place among our people such that we are determined to survive. Once that act of will takes place, that change of heart, the non-democratic means will be available to us.

The question then is what sort of position on abortion engenders a survival mentality among our people. At minimum, this requires a pro-child, pro-natal change of values. As I’ve mentioned before, having children, particularly white children that require high investment, is an act of putting oneself in voluntary slavery for two decades in the prime of one’s life. Thanks to easy contraception, childbearing in an intact nuclear family now requires an almost irrational, dare I say pre-rational, preference. In the wild, we only observe it in whites at above replacement levels among the deeply religious. And contra to some of the Alt Right, who believe that a declining population is manageable, even if we achieve our pan-European dream, we still must defend it against other civilizations, most notably the Chinese and insurgent Islam. This requires children, and a birthrate that cannot replace itself places our people in long-term danger.

Parents, then, are pre-rationally caring towards their children. No psychologically healthy parent can look at a child with genetic defects, or special needs caused by circumstances – such as the family I know whose perfectly healthy child is now paralyzed due to a freak infection that inflamed the spinal cord – and see that child as a cost center to be eliminated. Those in the Alt Right who push this, whether through autistic tendencies or misguided reaction to liberal dysgenic policies, alienate from their cause those sectors of the white population that are reproducing. When certain elements of the Alt Right push a moral code that normal white Christian people find appalling, they prevent the emergence of what could be a powerful alliance between the post-religious-right and secular ethnic nationalists. Such posturing, of showing one’s sophistication relative to the jeezus-loving rubes of the heartland, is a form of status signaling that is destructive to the very ends the Alt Right seeks to realize. The mass of Christian whites (as opposed to their self-appointed leaders) are natural allies of the Alt Right, consistently supporting Alt Right immigration policies in opinion polls, and forsaking this alliance could have catastrophic consequences for our people.

Any white society has more than ample resources to provide for our sick and infirm, and an Alt Right government would seek to reassure, not castigate, parents that resources will be available to take care of special needs children. No parent particularly wants such a burden, but with each conception parents are acutely aware of the risk, but it is a risk we take because we love our children. If we want to have pro-natal policies and compensate parents for the costs they endure to the benefit of everyone else, an Alt Right regime would seek to provide social insurance to parents that their children will be cared for, even if something goes wrong in the process.

Furthermore, the availability of abortion is a signal to young women that they can easily escape the consequences of shirking their historical duty to restrict their sexual activity to marriage. Such a policy encourages hedonism and will systematically produce young women unfit to be mothers due to moral degradation in youth. Feminists, of course, love abortion, because feminists loathe both men and mothers, and abortion is a policy that says that fathers have no rights to their children, even in matters of life and death.

What about rape? First, pregnancy from rape is rare, as the nonconsensual nature of the act is not conducive to the survival of sperm to fertilize an egg. Personally, I believe the availability of “morning after” emergency contraception is sufficient to cover true cases of rape, as opposed to those merely claiming it in retrospect. Since the woman has no specific knowledge of an embryo, and 40% of fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant in the uterus, to take a medicine to intentionally eliminate the conditions for implantation is not, in my view, morally problematic. We can have a reasonable pro-life position without giving away the whole store with actual surgical abortion of a fetus. The classic moral question of whether one would save a 2-year-old or a beaker of 20 fertilized eggs (if you could only save one from a fire) is compatible with this position – I would save the 2-year-old, not the fertilized eggs. But if the same choice were between a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy, or the two-year old, a valid choice could arguably be the woman. Hence life begins, in my view, at the moment the mother and child become one flesh at the time of implantation – the mother being the medium and the child being the message, a set of information ready to develop into a human. This may be a minority view among virulent pro-lifers, but I bring it up to demonstrate that a reasonable anti-abortion position is possible that still accounts for outlier cases of rape. Such a position does not even have to be official public policy, as the drugs necessary for emergency contraception are the same as those used for conventional contraception. No one would have sufficient evidence to prosecute even in a 100% pro-life official policy.

I implore the secular Alt-Right to reconsider any support for abortion. What are the odds the feminists are right on this one issue? The alienation of potential allies, if nothing else, would advise the wise against it. We want to win, not show our status relative to the very people – the non-pozzed, heartland Christian whites – we wish to preserve.

The New Testament’s approach to charity is fairly restricted. Paul tells us that those who do not work should not eat. Paul also goes through great pains to delineate which widows in the church were worthy of support – they had to be old (young ones should remarry) and blameless, holy women. There is no specific provision made for the social welfare of anyone else beyond widows and orphans, and absent such commands, none can be reliably inferred from Scripture itself.

Nevertheless, most Christians see charity of some sort as an obligation, and it has always been appropriate to give alms to the “worthy poor.” Prior to the modern era, charity was by necessity local, limited in scale and voluntary, due to the general scarcity of resources. When occasional crises like famines came, there simply was not enough excess production available to help everyone. Charity, then, was not a social welfare program so much as a prophylactic for the wealthy and powerful to avoid destructive overconfidence, to acknowledge the role of Providence in their position by showing consideration to the poor.

Christian charity as historically practiced was not dysgenic. Caring for widows, for example, usually involved supporting women who were formerly married, had children and were no longer able to care for themselves – the impact on dysgenics was zero. The care of orphans was likewise not dysgenic, as the ancient world featured a lot of random death from disease – orphans were children whose parents were taken by this randomness, and as a group their genetic quality was no different from the general population.

The Christian practice of saving infants from exposure was likewise non-dysgenic, as the vast majority of these cases were not due to actual deformity, but rather due to a preference for male children or fewer children. The Greek historian Polybius describes the depopulation of Greece:

For instance, take the following case. In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics. If, then, any one had advised us to send and ask the gods about this, and find out what we ought to say or do, to increase in number and make our cities more populous, would it not seem absurd, the cause of the evil being evident and the remedy being in our own hands?For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew. For in cases where of one or two children the one was carried off by war and the other by sickness, it is evident that the houses must have been left unoccupied, and as in the case of swarms of bees, so by small degrees cities became resourceless and feeble.

The emphasis is mine, but the scholarly consensus is that Polybius was censoring the Greeks for killing their children simply for their own convenience. Christian efforts to save exposed children would be positively eugenic in a time of population decline.

Only in the last 100 years has human ingenuity risen to a level where all people could theoretically be cared for, with cheap food, energy and housing from a general rise in technological-fueled productivity. It is not Christian charitable ethics, but rather the capability to care for large numbers of non-productive people at scale, that is the root cause of dysgenics today.

There is a valid argument, I believe, to the idea that our unprecedented productivity ought to be put to use to better the human condition through certain socialistic practices. I’m not sure where I fall on this issue, but Huey Long’s appeal to share the wealth of our industrial abundance does not sound crazy to me. This might seem particularly just in a place like Denmark where everyone is closely related – the state, arguably, simply formalizes and enforces (against cheaters) social norms that members of one’s extended family ought to be supported in their sickness and old age.

Among the Alt Right, there is some support for this sort of socialistic enterprise in a future ethnostate, but we are also aware of the externalities of such a situation. The nations of Europe, for example, have collapsed their birthrates, partially through spiritual decline, but also partially due to a change in incentives. When the state provides cradle to grave care, no one has motivation to make the sacrifices necessary to have children to in turn care for them in their old age. Human children, particularly in the high investment European culture, represent 20 years of voluntary slavery. Why bother if other people will pick up the tab for your old age support?

The Alt Right recognizes that these policies have externalities that must be fixed. In particular, productive citizens need to be highly financially incentivized to have children. So far, modest efforts to encourage native reproduction in Europe have been somewhat successful, but none to the point of raising the fertility to the magic 2.1+ children per woman level necessary for population stability. If and when a nationalist party holds complete power in a nation of Europe, hopefully experimentation with policy will reveal whether financial incentives are sufficient to induce childbearing. My guess is that they will be partially effective, but the overall trend towards dematerialization will tend to depress any merely economic (as opposed to spiritual) efforts to increase births. It is an unfortunate fact that many Western women are so spiritually impoverished that no amount of money could induce them away from Instagram, the clubs and their smartphone.

Most contemporary Christians would support pro-child policies, and indeed have historically supported eugenic policies like the Child Tax Credit. The more immediate problem, however, is the dysgenic effect of the welfare state. We have a lot of time for spiritual renewal and policy experimentation to encourage child-rearing among the productive, but lowering the overall quality of the gene pool through incentivizing the less productive to reproduce cannot be easily reversed.

I think many Christians would see the logic of my argument, but cringe at taking any action to address the problem. While positive incentives seem just, negative actions, such as sterilization, seem unjust. Let us look at the ethical questions involved.

It is important to recognize that the vast majority of welfare recipients are not legitimate causes for Christian charity. Despite cucky pastors’ rhetoric, a single mother who becomes pregnant through her own promiscuity, and shows bad judgment in mating with a man who will not support his child, is not a widow and her child is not an orphan, if the words of the Bible have any objective meaning. Her life will be hard, no doubt, but the hardships she will endure as a natural consequence of her sin may be the only thing that can shake her out of her vanity and cause her to repent. It’s important to recognize that we as a society have made a choice, a choice we are not ethically obligated to make, to show mercy to such individuals and go beyond the strict requirements of equity to care for the truly infirm and fatherless. Since we are not obligated to help the single mother ethically, it would be proper for us to put conditions on that aid, particularly when the conditions are necessary for the system of aid to continue. In short, a society that continually encourages the non-productive to reproduce will eventually destroy not only itself but also the very system of aid that comes from the abundance of a productive society.

Most Christians understand that giving cash to the homeless is irresponsible, as much of it will go to enable sin. Similarly, giving aid to the single mother without requiring her to take action to prevent the destruction of the system of aid that benefits her is irresponsible. As such, I believe it is entirely within the realm of Christian ethics to require, as a condition of aid, that single mothers be sterilized. This would not apply to widows with legitimate children of a dead father (and I’ll note here that the conflation of bastardy and widowing is a profound insult to widows, who are entitled to the aid of the church). For single mothers, they can choose to meet the condition and receive aid, or may choose to not meet the condition and not receive aid. There is no coercion, simply an exchange of promises, a covenant if you will, that those who receive extraordinary mercy must take extraordinary measures.

I have often, as a Christian, been annoyed by some of the atheist Alt Right’s embrace of abortion as a supposed eugenic practice. Proper rationing of charity, however, would ethically address this concern without the need to assault the dignity of motherhood with the availability of abortion. Irresponsible parents would be “one and done,” ensuring that their share of the population steadily decrease by natural attrition rather than unjust violence towards infants.

With little fanfare Tom Wolfe has released another of his non-fiction narratives, this time dealing with the history of the Theory of Evolution and the problem of the origin of human speech. Wolfe, surprisingly, flirts extensively with the idea of Intelligent Design, particularly evolution’s inability to explain certain properties of human beings.

The overall theme of Wolfe’s book is that we severely underappreciate human ability in relation to animals, the huge gulf between the simplest human and the most advanced apes, and all of this is enabled by human language. Wolfe claims language is an artifact of humanity, not an instinct, and emerged as a type of mnemonic to help our early ancestors remember the things around them. I find this a little fuzzy, and he avoids the biological issue of the necessity of the human brain to produce such an artifact. The obvious question is if speech is the artifact that enables all other artifacts

Wolfe took a lot of chances with this book, and his takedown of Noam Chomsky is particularly rich. His summary of Daniel Everett’s experiences with a primitive Amazon tribe that lacked any concept of time, complex sentences and produced no artifacts beyond the bow and arrow, and constructed no permanent dwellings is a treat for connoisseurs of human biodiversity. Everett’s field work destroyed Chomsky’s Freud-like pseudoscience in linguistics, and the tension between them (Everett being a highly goyish outdoorsman, former Christian missionary from a flyover town) is particularly rich.

The first half of the book includes some critiques of evolution that are never quite taken to a conclusion, likely because Wolfe either doesn’t want to think about their implications or doesn’t want to “out” himself as a theist in his old age.

I would rate the book a 3/5 but Wolfe is such a damn good writer it’s a 4/5.

As mentioned previously, I think it a common error among infrequent or non-church-attenders to consider themselves disqualified from being a part of a community of faith because of their difficulty in believing all of the claims of Christianity. The extreme individualism of Americans has infected our church experience. Church is not primarily about individual reason and beliefs, but rather experiential and communal. We do not have to reason ourselves into faith, we merely have to get reason out of the way, to consider the possibility of religious truth, and then allow our experiences and intuitions to shape our faith over time.

The Alt Right vision of enlightened nationalism is a universal moral position. We do not need to go beyond good and evil, for our ordinary categories of good and evil are sufficient to defend our position and ensure our survival. We declare that each people has a right to a homeland without interference from others. We declare the objective evil of aggressive war in interfering with those boundaries and killing off the best of our young men too often in service of private gains for a privileged group of elites. So many of us are like hipsters, ironically detached from the positions we hold, afraid to truly take our own side in the argument. Moral universalism is an extremely powerful motivator for humans, particularly whites, and our ideas are just, right universal moral principles. We need not be afraid that embracing an objective morality will ensure our doom. To the contrary, the bravest and best motivations for the preservation of anything, particularly the beauty and glory of Western Civilization, contain within them the idea that something is inherently, objectively, universally good. Few men are willing to die, or even live, for arbitrary configurations of matter. We feel in our souls that we are more than matter, that the world of immaterial forms is the prime reality and that goodness, truth and beauty are more real than the material forms that represent them. Christian religious faith is a particularization of trusting these intuitions over the pessimism of materialism.

Christianity also focuses on the concept of sin. Sin is the commission of an act at odds with natural law, and Christian theologians universally testify that sin is always against our broad self-interest at the group level. Lying and cheating in business dealings, for example, may benefit one in the short-term, but writ large results in the backwards, crushing poverty we observe in low trust societies. Materialism has no explanation for the human tendency for self-destruction, the “death drive” as it is called, something we do not observe in animals. Whether beautiful white women marring their angelic skin with morbid tattoos, or the situation in Germany, where many whites welcome third world rapists with open arms, self-destruction is a powerful force in humanity’s behavior. The theology of sin explains this, in that it posits a flaw in our wills that needs divine correction. Perhaps this is true for you, but I certainly have areas in my life where I do things that are entirely self-destructive for no good reason. My faith practice has helped me reduce these areas over time, but the process will be lifelong. At my best, I am motivated not by guilt, but by the realization that I need help and grace infused into my soul to overcome my own worst tendencies. The sanctifying work of Christianity is properly directed towards personal areas of failure, and perverted when used to stoke societal guilt. The theologian R. J. Rushdoony elucidated this perfectly in his masterpiece, The Politics of Guilt and Pity:

The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve the unshakeable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained of his social energy and cultural activity by his over-riding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed, as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and new age.

Finally, I will bring up perhaps the most practical consideration, which is the challenge of reproduction outside of religious faith. Child-rearing, I can attest, is a form voluntary slavery. I have never observed, and I challenge anyone to disprove me, above-replacement fertility in a non-religious population. Having 3+ small children is very difficult – sleep deprivation, lack of ability to focus, negative effects on the body, etc. Without the certainty that one’s life and reproduction has objective meaning, it is very difficult to bear the burden of above-replacement fertility. It’s much more comfortable to blackpill and remain childless, which is unfortunately one of the dominant messages emanating from the “red pill” men’s rights oriented part of the Alt Right. Without an objective good to one’s sacrifice, the ready offer of comfort is compelling, if we are but undirected arrangements of matter with no ultimate meaning. The red-pill black-pill is both correct and incorrect at the same time.

It is practically correct in the sense that the risk of divorce theft is very real. I also think it is correct to say, as Tucker Max did, reflecting on his past degeneracy, that the pickup scene consists of men with mommy issues interacting with women with daddy issues. We live in a culture where a striking percentage of the adults now are children of divorce, so it is not surprising that being an aloof jerk would be attractive to many women. Many of the “game” concepts are valid beyond that, particularly the analysis of what men vs. women find attractive, and the important of sexual polarity. The blackpill part is the insistence that all marriages are best avoided. There is even an acronym to mock those who point out exceptions – NAXALT (“Not All X Are Like That”). It is true that NAXALT is not a valid counterargument to broad statistical truths, whether talking about the need for society-wide divorce/alimony reform or the case for restricting non-white immigration. However, to mock the idea that one can find exceptions and solutions in the midst of otherwise bad situations is suicidal. The same black-pillers advocate economic independence, despite the fact that small businesses are more likely to fail than marriages. The irrationality is akin to a person owning a gold mine who complains that the ore is 99% base metals – the 1% gold is the point, not the overall distribution.

Statistically, there are many factors that can reduce the odds of divorce to a reasonable level. In our degenerate society today, the only attractive women who are constraining their sexuality are those with a moral pre-commitment, and those women are largely found in the churches. I observe it all the time: beta men marrying attractive women and producing beautiful families. It still happens, contrary to the blackpill pessimists, and it happens in communities of faith. The women in these communities outnumber the men, and the men who are there are very beta. An Alt Right man showing masculine confidence in such a community would have his pick of Christian women. Many of the men in charge of these institutions are so weak, as evidenced by their constant public cucking, that taking over the leadership of the churches would be fairly easy in many cases.

This is not to say that one should go around faking belief for the social benefits. If there is an overarching theme to this series, it is that churches are as much about and for people who desire faith, and to deepen their faith, as they are about those who are firm in it. The church is a community, a body of those following that intuition of objective truth, goodness, and beauty, and believing as much as they can while accepting the grace offered for remaining unbelief. All Christian flavors of theology make allowances for doubt, and you will not be isolated or castigated in a church because you struggle. We all struggle, we all seek, we all wish these mysteries could be made more clear. God knows the mind he gave you, and the skeptical mind, the independent thinker, that which characterizes the Alt Right, is not excluded from the community of faith. We are to believe, and obey, and fulfill the good, beautiful and true as best we are able. In an age of lies, it is no coincidence those who are least able to delude themselves would be at the forefront of defending all of those things for which the Christian faith provides objective value.

Faith provides hope in the darkest of struggles, and there is a reason despair is considered among the worst Christian sins. Throughout history, it appears as if some thumb has been on the scale, saving our people at the last moment. If we can achieve faith that the arc of history has direction, that the things we defend are real and not perhaps, in our despairing moments, an evolutionary cul-de-sac destined to be ground to powder by a pitiless Darwinian mill, then the temptation to despair will be overcome. Bertrand Russell honestly captured the unyielding despair of atheism when he said,

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation be safely built.

Though he struggles to end on a note of optimism, the fruits of atheism are well-known. Cut off from meaning and salvation, as a group they seek it on earth, voting for the enemies of our civilization. Fertility rates are the lowest of any identifiable religious view. Two centuries of atheist thought have yet to build a scaffold sufficient for the atheist to overcome his unyielding despair. For the act of having children, particularly many children, is an act of optimism towards the future, and optimism is irrational to the atheist worldview.

As an Alt Righter, you struggle for things of objective value. You are torn, I believe, by a perception of Christianity that causes you to believe it weakness, that morality must somehow constrain our ability to survive. You are among the few who can face despair and struggle on in spite of it, for the good of our people. Faith is not weakness, but strength to carry on no matter the odds, of hope that the struggle is never lost. I hope you will consider struggling for faith, and perhaps as you behold your own children, your flesh and blood, you will be confirmed in your intuition that there are things of infinite and eternal value, that this material world is but a shadow of things beyond. The flower of Western Civilization points to it, another world of forms and perfection, hidden in plain sight.